A Fair Warning to All Designers

Warning to all Designers here,

If some designer/design company contacted you to outsource a project, be sure to ask at-least a deposit or down-payment prior to start or your time and effort may all go to waste.

as I have experience this, this designer/design company here at talk freelance contacted me to do a PSD to WP conversion, at first we had agreed to a specific price and then he gave me a GO signal to start converting the PSD to WP, after I'm done with the conversion he then told me some reason about his client is unable to pay... days became weeks, weeks became month then after 2 months still no payment and guess what more reasons that his client was unable to pay...blah blah blah...

Lesson Learned... Just hoping no one will experience what I've been through.

You should always ask for a 50% deposit, it is common sense.

Yea, I used to always ask for at least half of the project money up front, otherwise I would just walk away from the deal.

It is generally acceptable to ask for 25-75% up front depending on the brand name of the company and what they are asking to be done work wise. If the company is a well known brand and they are meeting with you face to face, and asking for in depth work then 25% would be acceptable. However, if the company contacted you via e-mail and had spelling errors in their e-mail then it is acceptable to ask for 75% up front.

No matter how small a project is, I would always recommend having a contract in place too. I'm not sure what your fee was to do this project, but if it was a large amount and you had a contract in place, you'd have grounds to sue them for the money outstanding.

I guess we all learn these mistakes when we are first starting out, but I'll bet you'll never not ask for a deposit again

It stinks to get burned. It's always a good idea to get something down as a non-refundable deposit and have a contract in writing.